Water from a Saturnian Moon Rains Down on the Ringed Planet

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Enceladus, a small satellite of Saturn, has captivated planetary scientists for years with its watery polar geysers and ridgelike surface features known as "tiger stripes." Now it has a new layer of intrigue. The gas and ice escaping from Enceladus and shooting out from the moon’s south pole in towering jets, which fill Saturn’s diffuse E ring, also seem to rain down on Saturn itself, providing water vapor to the giant planet’s upper atmosphere.

Given the outflow rates from Enceladus, Hartogh and his colleagues estimate that the jet-filled water cloud should suffice to provide the water vapor that has been detected in Saturn’s atmosphere. Hence, they reported in the August issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics, "Enceladus is thus the likely source of Saturn’s external water, though an additional confirmation could be provided by the latitudinal distribution of H2O on Saturn."

Interestingly, Enceladus seems not to be the source of water vapor detected on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. Hartogh and his co-authors calculate that Enceladus’s geysers provide far too little water vapor to account for the observations of Titan. For now, they wrote, "the origin of Titan’s water remains a puzzle."

2 Comments

If the current estimation is correct (Enceladus releases 250kg of water per second), the planet would release the equivalent of its entire mass in water in 13,701.4 years. This seems very short. Interested in finding out how they came up with 250kg…or how Wikipedia came up with the weight figure.

> release the equivalent of its .. mass .. in 13,701.4 years
Hi amirblachman, your calculation seems to be off by a factor of 10^6. With a mass (according to Wikipedia) of 1.08×10^20kg and a release of 250kg/s, Enceladus would release 7.9×10^9kg/year and thus it would take a theoretical 13.7 billion years until it has lost its mass equivalent.